Wednesday, February 16, 2011

This isn't the most thrilling post on the block, but I've got to put it somewhere. I mess around with a lot of different tunings, but rarely ever write them down...or remember them. So, in an attempt to not waste my time by coming up with things that I then can't recreate, this little post will contain a list of these tunings, as I stumble across them. These are all from head-to-floor.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Koen from DNK kindly asked if I would play something for their Significant Music series on Monday, and the first thing I thought of was this, which I've written about elsewhere in slightly different forms...

UPDATE: I kind of just rewrote this again based on what I said last night at DNK. Now I'm done.

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In 1988 I dropped out of music school. I don't know if I ever really recovered from my time there, but by 1991/1992 the wound was still fresh enough to where I was having problems making music.

I was working at the Center for Music Research because I'd had the astoundingly good fortune to be in an airplane seat next to Steven Newcomb, who was running the place while working on the initial specification for HyTime, from which the HTML that you're viewing right now has borrowed many many concepts.

Regardless of the fact that I was missing the two main requirements for the job: 1) I knew nothing about computers and 2) I couldn't type, Dr. Newcomb hired me as a "lab assistant", which meant that I kind of sat around and watched people try to use email on UNIX terminals while an army of dot-matrix printers chattered nonstop in the background.

At the CMR I met Al Nelson, who was the other lab monitor and thankfully on the same frustrated musical trajectory as I was, and together to pass the long boring hours of lab monitoring we developed a kind of game, where we would search the music library archives for the most disturbing music we could find and then play it for each other on headphones, hoping to elicit some kind of visible physical or psychological response: a shiver of revulsion; clutching your ears in pain; falling to the ground; throwing up; bleeding, etc.

After a few months of this, the game no longer functioned properly: our tolerances for extreme sound and/or concepts had gotten so high that nothing was disturbing "noise" any more: everything was music. One day Al came into the CMR lab, where I was probably accidentally deleting a MicroEMACS message that I'd just spent hours typing (but to who? who else that I knew would've been on email in 1991? The only person I can think of is Al). He had an eyebrow-wiggling look of triumph on his face, and was brandishing something formidable-looking.

Which turned out to be Dry Lungs V, a gorgeously scarily-packaged 2-CD compilation released on San Francisco's Subterranean Records. My sheltered suburban ass had never seen anything like it, and the noise tracks on there immediately and completely redefined my ideas about the useful limits of structure, texture, aggression, technique, you name it.

The sound of Masonna, Hijokaidan, Merzbow, Incapacitants, Solmania, K. K. Null, and Violent Onsen Geisha was threatening and and beautiful, but Dry Lungs was also my introduction to musique concrète via Un Drame Musical Instantane, Etant Donnes, and Helene Sage + Bernhard Vitet. It was also my first exposure to non-hiphop sampling (Carl Stone) and advanced feedback (Arcane Device), and that's not even everything.

That's Dry Lungs. In 1992/93, shortly after leaving Al and the CMR (I graduated), I found (for cheap) what has remained maybe my favorite nostalgic Osaka (I think) noise disc, Come Again II (on Kim Cascone's long-defunct Silent Records offshoot Furnace Records). This is easily on my list of Top Most Important Records Anywhere, even maybe Top 5. Actually yes Top 5. For me the track I played at DNK, Holy Screaming, remains utterly beautiful and primally transcendent...I've spent more than a few minutes rewriting this sentence to try and explain why, but trying to simplify it into something verbally describable seems to miss the point entirely.

Monday, February 7, 2011

I like nice easy accidents like this. This is David Bowie's Subterraneans mashed up against Lynyrd Skynyrd's Tuesday's Gone. I just dropped them both an octave and started them at the same time, fading in the Skynyrd. I'll hopefully get around to a more considered edit of this soon, I need it for a new theater piece.

While I was slowing things down, I decided to finally mess with the recently-ballyhooed super slowdown tool, Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. It's...OK, if you're not looking for realism. The artifacts are nicely different. Here it is applied to a harmonium loop I've got bigger plans for.

Here's the recording of our gig at Oorsprong last week, three-fifths of The Family Tapes plus Christophe Scherbaum.

Plus electronics: Raph, Alfredo, and I have never really played together with effects before, it was surprisingly understated. You can't really tell how quietly we're playing until someone coughs or sneezes and drowns out the music for a second.

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This is the attempting-to-be-resuscitated online repository for Groningen-based guitarist, lapsteel toucher, arranger/assembler, and sound editor, Mark Morse, aka (dj) morsanek aka Morsanek aka etc etc etc. I took a break from music again last year, and what's out here currently is kind of a disorganized mess. If you're just interested in music only, you could either go to SoundCloud for my solo stuff, or here under the Recordings tag here for other situations, click here to filter on that.

I also teach private guitar lessons, specifically aimed at getting students over the hump from frustrated beginner to having enough basic technique and fretboard knowledge to be able to start figuring out what kind of guitar player they want to be.

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My ongoing struggle with being a non-repetitive, idiom-resistant improvising guitarist often finds me attempting to use prepared guitar as a sort of sampler or emulator, and generally experiments with the limits of texture as narrative glue. I also like working with handheld amplifiers and feedback.

I'm not doing much laptop work these days, but when I did, my assemblings have always been influenced by the rhythms and techniques of film editing, and...texturally I'm pretty fascinated by timbral combinations involving both instrumental and non-instrumental sounds. I also like to play with the differences between "chance music" and group improvisation and the role of the listener in discovering or manufacturing structure within either. Call me.

In addition to playing kind of regularly in ad hoc improv ensembles around Amsterdam, I used to be a full- or part-time member of a few irregularly performing and/or possibly defunct entities:

Morsanek: Tended to be the catch-all for sample-based constructions, performances, or edits/mixes, usually just me but not always, and frankly it's a name that's not getting much use anymore unless I'm DJing, that is unless I'm DJing ass2ass with Felicia von Zweigbergk, then we're usually called something else corporate-sounding like Von Zweigbergk & Morse.Sleep Gunner: guitar duo paying homage to 1950s heartbreak duo The Louvin Brothers, with composer/guitar hero Jeroen Kimman. Website hereHidden Pincer: (Still) "in development", designed to rip off Young Marble Giants, ESG, Brainiac, and The Aislers Set in equal measure. Could also be called Fungo Setting if we're not careful.Light Metal Trio: improvising duo/trio interested in unstable aluminum foil preparations. With me on tabletop doubleneck, Dirk Bruinsma on baritone sax and Santiago Botero on double bass and living in South America.Daddy's Balls: Eternally fictional duo with John Dikeman bearing an as-yet-undefined focus, certainly something horrifying. It'll either be called this or Shitpickle or Cumming Dairy Queen. Super Hardon Collider: impaired no-wave jazz with most of the loud boys from Cactus Truck plus Rune Lohse on drums and Scandinavian reserve. Exact spelling TBD.The Family Tapes: no-effects electric guitar quintet exploring an anti-wanking approach to ensemble improvising, critcally lauded during their 4 days of existence. Website here.Minister Kebab: Defunct but an old favorite. With Hilary Jeffery on trombone and tromboscillator and Alan "Gunga" Purves on all manner of homemade percussion, plus me on samplers, feedback, and analog electronics. Influences or resulting resonances include Throbbing Gristle, La Monte Young, and cartoon Scottish-Haitian pipe bands. Recordings here.The Durians: Mysterious two-decade-old Atlanta-based improvised art rock quartet featuring the ultra-pithy verbal stylings of high-school teacher/Dante translator Terrill Soules.